Papers for

functional analysts

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Counterexamples show failure of sum rule for monotone operators

Nonmaximal sums of maximally monotone operators under Rockafellar's constraint qualification

Abstract: We construct counterexamples to Rockafellar's sum conjecture in which two maximally monotone operators satisfy the interior-domain condition but their sum is not maximally monotone. We give one counterexample on $c_0$ and another on $\ell^1$ with its usual norm. We establish a general construction theorem that computes the entire monotone polar of a class of graphs, gives a necessary and sufficient condition for their maximal monotonicity, and shows how a positive rank-one perturbation yields a nonmaximal sum under this condition. We verify the theorem's hypotheses and its maximality criterion on $c_0$, thereby obtaining a counterexample to the conjecture. Furthermore, we construct a bounded linear surjection from $\ell^1$ onto $c_0$ and use it to obtain the counterexample on $\ell^1$.

Wed 9 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Sometimes in math, when you combine two objects that each have a special 'maximally monotone' property, the combination should also have that property. This was a long-standing idea thought to always be true under certain conditions, called Rockafellar's sum conjecture. The authors found explicit cases where the combination loses this property, contradicting the old belief. They proved this by creating specific examples in certain function spaces and developed a method to understand when these properties hold or fail.
Open → 2609.10487v1